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Taste Texas The Lone Star Rising
Texas! The home of black gold, ten gallon hats, Willie Nelson, the 41st and 43rd presidents, and Bugs Bunny. When I think of Texas and alcoholic beverages, I don't think of wine…I think of longneck bottles of Long Horn beer and shots of Texas whiskey. The last few months on the twittering machine have increased my awareness of the Texas grape. I've been curious if the grapes grow bigger there and if the wine is over the top, like most things Texan. When my friend Ben from Vinotology.com asked if I would be interested in participating in a Texas Twitter tasting I immediately said yes. 1) Ben is a kick ass guy! 2) I've never tried Texas wine and 3) Ben is a kick ass guy!
Ben arranged for Mandola Estates Winery to send samples to participating bloggers. When I saw the list, I was pumped for the conversation. I've been a fan of Jim from VineGeek.com, Joe from SuburbanWino.com, and Joe and Amy from AnotherWineBlog.com for about six months. Recently I became acquainted with DallasWineChick.com and VintageTexas.com through Ben. With all of these fantastic bloggers I was willing to put aside my anti-Texas bias (mostly because of the Dallas Cowboys) and learn something new.
Mandola Estate Winery is about 20 miles southwest of Austin, Texas and was founded in 2005. From the web site – "Mandola Estate recreates a small corner of Italy, where native Italian grape varieties — Pinot Grigio, Vermentino, Moscato, and Sangiovese — flourish together with the great grapes of France and California. The wines of the Mandola Estate Winery represent some of the best wines to be produced in Texas today: hand-crafted wines vinified in a state-of-the-art winery in the Texas Hill Country." Their web site contains a pretty cool blog and the winery and wine maker are available on Twitter (always cool in my book) @mandolawinery and @davetxwine
With my trusty Washington Redskins mug nearby, I jumped into the big world of Texas wine! To view the entire transcript of the tasting event, click here.
The NectarView
2008 Mandola Estate Dry Rose
- The Stuff: 90% Cabernet and 10% blend of Montepulciano, Sangiovese and Dolcetto; Brief contact with skins, fermented and aged in stainless steel; 13.3%abv; 892 cases made; cork enclosure
- The Swirl: Beautiful red jewelry tones with shimmering translucence. Opulent color.
- The Sniff: Sour strawberry and earth. Smells like it could be sweet but zero residual sugar
- The Sip: Thin strawberry and cherry jolly rancher. A steely minerality with low back end structure and quick finish wrap up this easy drinking Rose.
- The Score: A summer pool-side sipper that lacks tons flavor or pizzazz, but for only $10, this could be one to stock up on. I score it a 3 out of 5
#TasteTexas Quote: Mandola Rose 08: very deep color for rose. pretty sexy. earthy/funky nose. strawberries and tart cherry on palate – From @VineGeek
2008 Mandola Estate Sangiovese
- The Stuff: 100% Sangiovese from Reddy Vineyards; 9 months in neutral oak; 13%abv; 1323 cases; cork enclosure
- The Swirl: Ruby plum color with nice pearl quality toward the edges. About 70% opaque. A slight cloudiness to the color
- The Sniff: Earthy mulberry with hints of sticks and mild undertones of red fruit
- The Sip: Not a lot happening from the fruit on this wine. Predominately cherries (sour Bing). The earthy mineratily continues through the palate. There is some good structure and on the back end with a decent acidity. The finish has some stoniness to it and is fleeting.
- The Score: At $24, this is not a wine I could recommend at the price. I'll score it a 3 minus out of 5. There is nothing off in it, but I'm just not feeling the Texas heat on this wine and the price is a little high.
#TasteTexas Quote: Mandola Sangiovese: Overall score B, little pricey but so are a lot of similar Italian Sangioveses Will improve w/ age of vines – From @vintagetexas
2008 Mandola Estate Dolcetto
- The Stuff: 100% Dolcetto from Bingham Family Vineyards; neutral oak for 9 months; 12.2%abv; 890 cases; cork enclosure
- The Swirl: Medium purple plum color that moves out to stained leather edges. About 80% opaque
- The Sniff: A nice whiff of pipe tobacco and dried sour cherries.
- The Sip: A shy tasting sweet tart and dried plum. More depth than the previous Texas wines in the tasting.
- The Score: At $26 I can score this wine a 3 out of 5. There is nothing spectacular about the wine but it does provide a solid effort and would pair well with grilling food and Pizza. Price seems a little high for this type of wine. I would recommend serving slightly chilled.
#TasteTexas Quote: I think you're right. Of all of the Texas wines I've tastes, I think Mandola is headed in the right direction. #TasteTexas – From @houstonwino
Cellar Tracker Reviews (2 Scores) 84 pts
NV Mandola Estate Canto Felice
- The Stuff: A proprietary blend of various grapes and vintages. Changes from year to year. 12.5%abv; 3.5% residual sugar; 1506 cases; cork enclosure
- The Swirl: Thin light strawberry color, reminiscent of Pinot Noir; about 60% opaque
- The Sniff: Tight nose with sweet sugary strawberry and sour cherry fruit
- The Sip: As described in the video this is sweet Thanksgiving in a glass. A tart cranberry flavor with cinnamon and nutmeg spices. Sweet but not syrupy.
- The Score: Tempered with the comment that I am NOT a fan of sweet wines, I still don't find the flavors of this wine to be enjoyable. Some people during the tasting commented that it was their favorite. For those that follow my reviews and align with my tastes I can only score this wine a 3 minus out of 5; $18
#TasteTexas Quote: Canto Felice is a mouth full of plums and apricots and some honey. Not for everyone, but I don't mind it – From @suburbanwino
All in all, my trip to Texas was a fun and enjoyable learning experience. The wine being produced is drinkable and provides a great launching point for the future. Each offering held its own for varietal specificity and contained good terroir, acidity and balance. The fruit flavors were thin. As the vineyards mature and winemaking continues its progress I expect to see a few rising stars from the Lone Star state. I'll leave you with these two impressions of Texas.
13 comments on "Taste Texas The Lone Star Rising"
Ben Simons Thanks for dredging up those old memories. What the hell was our starting QB doing holding kicks anyway!?!?!?
Anyway, I think I'm pretty much in agreement with you on these wines. I think you got a good taste of the potential that Texas wine has. Now that more producers are starting to figure out the varieties that do well here, we just need to wait for the maturity to develop. In the meantime, price is definitely a concern. I think that is often the case for local wines outside the Big 4, and Texas is no exception. Texas fruit is significantly more expensive for the wineries to buy than the fruit sourced from California, etc. Until supply starts to catch up with demand, I think that we will continue to see these high prices on wines with "Texas" on the label.
Thanks for participating in this event with me. I always appreciate the insights that you bring to any event, and I was glad to have you joining us for Taste Texas. Looking forward to #WAWine!
Joshua S Sweeney I've still got 2 bottles of Texas wine to get into… but what I've had so far, I like.
P.S. J.R. Ewing to me means the math-rock band from Norway with an epically-mustachioed frontman (a la Freddie Mercury). Never watched the show.
@melanie0 It was fun to be a part of it with you. Even though I am the Dallas Wine Chick, I find that I am still not in love with most wine made here. To quantify it, out of 650 bottles in the cellar, two hail from Texas.
Sip with Me! What a great opportunity! I'm so intrigued by Texas wine and was really bummed to have missed the Texas tasting, and yeah, I guess Ben's kindof a kickass guy. Good thing you kept that Redskins mug around for protection, though it wouldn't have helped much in a Texas dust storm!
Joe Romo. Hee hee hee.
This was a fun event…good host, interesting area, heated rivalries between bloggers.
One thing, though: I don't know why everyone thinks the Canto Felice was so sweet. To me, if was like an off-dry Riesling (not Riesling flavors, but similar sweetness to a German Kabinett or maybe a Spatlese…somewhere in between). Do I drink too much dessert wine? Or is my recognition threshold very high?
William Maltese Yeah, it has been my experience, too, that Texas, more than able to come up with big juicy thick steaks on the barbecue, so far still has to rely upon France to come up with the robust kind of red to accompany any such meal.
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Conventions: So that I don't have to worry about, fix a field $k$ of characteristic zero, and always work over it. Categories of modules, etc., are always $\infty$-categories of dg modules. Algebras are "associative" in the coherent-homotopy sense. All tensor products are left-derived. Etc. I am of course always interested in hearing about subtleties and generalizations of such conventions, but for the sake of this question you may pretend that I understand this part of the story.
A construction: Let $A$ be an algebra and $V$ a left $A$-module. Write $V^\ast$ for the linear dual to $V$; then $V^\ast$ is a right $A$-module. Set $C = V^\ast \otimes_A V$. I claim that $C$ is a coalgebra, at least when $V$ satisfies some finiteness condition. Indeed, if $V$ satisfies a finiteness condition, then $\operatorname{End}_k(V) = V\otimes_k V^\ast$, and the action of $A$ on $V$ is encoded in a map $A \to \operatorname{End}_k(V)$, which by associativity is a map of $A$-$A$-bimodules. Then the comultiplication is:
$$ C = V^\ast \otimes_A V = V^\ast \otimes_A A \otimes_A V \to V^\ast \otimes_A (V \otimes_k V^\ast) \otimes_A V = C \otimes_k C $$
This is coassociative on account of the coassociativity of tensor products.
For $X$ any left $A$-module, there is a corresponding left $C$-comodule defined by $V^\ast \otimes_A X$; the comodule structure is
$$ V^\ast \otimes_A X = V^\ast \otimes_A A \otimes_A X \to V^\ast \otimes_A (V \otimes_k V^\ast) \otimes_A X = C \otimes_k (V^\ast \otimes_A X) $$
Aside: Let $C$ be any (coassociative) coalgebra, $Y$ a left $C$-comodule, and $Z$ a right $C$-comodule. Recall that the underived cotensor product is the 1-categorical equalizer of the two maps $Z \otimes Y \rightrightarrows Z \otimes C \otimes Y$. The (derived) cotensor product $Z \Box_C Y$ is the right-derived version thereof (cotensor is left-exact, if I haven't made an error); it should also be the $\infty$-categorical equalizer.
At least in the 1-categorical non-dg setting cotensor products of bi-comodules and so on are not always associative. But they are associative when all coalgebras are flat over whatever ground ring you're working over, and we're working over a field, so this is not an issue. I don't know what the correct statement is in the dg $\infty$-categorical level.
The construction, continued: In a similar way, $V$ is a right $C = V^\ast \otimes_A V$ comodule, and so for any left $C$-comodule $Y$, I can define a left $A$-module $V \Box_C Y$.
All together, I've constructed functors
$$V^\ast \otimes_A: A\text{-mod} \leftrightarrow C\text{-comod} :V \Box_C.$$
One composition of these functors (the one from $C$-comod to $C$-comod) is the identity:
$$ V^\ast \otimes_A V \Box_C = C \Box_C $$
The other composition cannot always be the identity — just imagine what would happen if I took $V$ to be the zero module!
Question: A statement that perhaps deserves to be called Koszul duality is that these two functors are an equivalence of $\infty$-categories. Of course, that seems almost nonsense to me, because in the non-dg-$\infty$ world categories of modules and categories of comodules seem quite different. So part of my question is to clarify the statement of the statement. But the bulk of my question is: What conditions do I need to add in the above exposition to have the statement I'd like? For example, I would like to identify $\operatorname{End}_k(V) = V \otimes_k V^\ast$, and so I would expect to need some "finiteness" condition on $V$, or I would expect to need some topology.
Note that what many people call "Koszul duality" consists also of taking the dual $C^\ast$ to the coalgebra $C$, so as to get an algebra. Every left comodule of $C$ is a left module of $C^\ast$, but there are generically more of the latter, at least in the 1-categorical version of the story. Given that many discussions of Koszul duality use the (derived) $\operatorname{End}_A(V,V)$, which is an algebra that should be essentially the same as $C^\ast$, I worry that maybe the algebra-to-algebra version is more robust. But I'm not sure.
Bonus question and further reading: Sometime soon I will be writing up a construction related to the one above, as part of a larger project. I picked up the above ideas from discussions with various people. But I would like to give credit where it's due, so I would like to hear about any particular papers I should be sure to cite.
For further reading, you might check out this question from the first month of MathOverflow, and also perhaps Jacob Lurie's ICM address.

subset: commoncrawl


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Illinois' race for governor: A populism and proxy war
By Benjamin Yount | Illinois Watchdog
CHICAGO, Ill. — The working man in Illinois apparently can't lose.
Both Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn and his newly minted Republican challenger Bruce Rauner are laying a "man of the people" groundwork in their run at the governor's mansion in Illinois.
WORKING MAN'S FRIEND? Rauner wants to build Illinois' economy not increase government spending.
"As long as I'm governor, I'm here to fight for the 99.99 percent," Quinn said in his salt of the earth acceptance speech after easily winning the Democratic primary. "Together, we will build and protect the middle class and keep Illinois moving forward."
Rauner, a multimillionaire who squeaked out a victory against a public employee union-backed opponent, sounded a similar every-man tone.
"This is about the truck driver in Rockford looking for more work," Rauner said. "This is about the factory worker in Decatur who lost his job…this is about the single mother in Pilsen, struggling to make ends meet who wants to have a better life."
Rauner supporter and Palatine GOP precinct committeeman Kevin Cavanaugh said voters are going to have a choice between two very different visions of populism.
"(Rauner) is playing to what people want," Cavanaugh said. "There's a want for tax rollbacks, there's a want for fiscal responsibility."
Quinn's populism is what voters have come to expect from the two-term Democrat: government action and government spending.
"I'm here to fight for working people who deserve a fair shake," Quinn told his crowd of well-wishers, "And I'm here today to fight for an economy that works for everyone, not just for the billionaires, but for everybody."
Quinn's primary victory speech echoed his gubernatorial address to lawmakers from last month. He once again called for a $10-an-hour minimum wage.
But the battle for the governor's mansion is going to be as much a proxy war over the role of public sector unions as it is about fight for who is the real man of the people.
Rauner made no secret of his desire to unseat the "government union bosses" during his run through the primary.
Those union bosses, including American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Service Employees International Union and Illinois' teachers unions, have donated millions of dollars to Quinn over the years.
Andrew Matthews, a Illinois State University political science professor and local education union president, said there's no doubt the proxy fight over labor will add millions of dollars to what is already expected to be an expensive November election.
"I don't know what our union will end up doing. I don't know where AFSCME is going to end up. I don't know where SEIU (will end up)," Matthews said. "This is a Pat Quinn versus Bruce Rauner race. (But) certainly organized labor is going to have a voice in that race. We have a voice in every race."
Ron Gidwitz, a former GOP candidate for governor and Rauner financier, said he expects labor unions from outside the state to open the flood gates, and pour millions of dollars into Illinois.
"They're pretty determined that we'll have a tough race in the fall," Gidwitz added. "We'll see what happens."
Contact Benjamin Yount at email@example.com and find him on Twitter @BenYount.
The post Illinois' race for governor: A populism and proxy war appeared first on Watchdog.org.


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There is nothing like a head cold to make us feel a little dazed. We get things like colds and the flu because of changes in our immune system. Researchers have a good idea what causes immune system changes on Earth -- think stress, inadequate sleep and improper nutrition. But the results of two NASA collaborative investigations -- Validation of Procedures for Monitoring Crewmember Immune Function (Integrated Immune) and Clinical Nutrition Assessment of ISS Astronauts, SMO-016E (Clinical Nutrition Assessment) -- recently published in the Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research suggest that spaceflight may temporarily alter the immune system of crew members flying long duration missions aboard the International Space Station. This is of concern as NASA looks ahead to six-month and multiple-year missions to asteroids, the moon and Mars because something as simple as a cold or the flu can be risky business in space.
Data generated early in NASA's Integrated Immune study indicated that the distribution of immune cells in the blood of crew members aboard the space station is relatively unchanged during flight. However, they also revealed that some cell function is significantly lower than normal, or depressed, and some cell activity is heightened. In a sense, the immune systems of crew members are confused.
When cell activity is depressed, the immune system is not generating appropriate responses to threats. This may also lead to the asymptomatic viral shedding observed in some crew members, which means latent, or dormant, viruses in the body reawaken, but without symptoms of illness. When activity heightens, the immune system reacts excessively, resulting in things like increased allergy symptoms and persistent rashes, which have been reported by some crew members.
"Prior to the Integrated Immune study, little immune system in-flight data had been collected," said Brian Crucian, Ph.D. and NASA biological studies and immunology expert. "Previous post-flight studies were not enough to make any determination about spaceflight's effect on the immune system. This in-flight data provided the information we needed to determine that immune dysregulation does occur and actually persists during long-duration spaceflight."
Recently, in a collaboration between NASA's Integrated Immune and Clinical Nutrition Assessment flight studies, researchers examined the blood plasma of 28 crew members before, during and after their missions. They were measuring for the concentration of cytokines -- the proteins that regulate immunity. Cytokines recruit immune cells to the infected or injured body site, facilitate cell-to-cell communication, and signal immune cells to activate and mount a defense against invaders. This process is usually referred to as inflammation. The data indicated that, like the changes in cell function indicated in the Integrated Immune study, crew members also have changes in blood cytokines that persist during flight. This gives researchers an idea of what areas of a crew member's immune system may be confused during flight.
According to Crucian, the immune system is likely being altered by many factors associated with the overall spaceflight environment. "Things like radiation, microbes, stress, microgravity, altered sleep cycles and isolation could all have an effect on crew member immune systems," said Crucian. "If this situation persisted for longer deep space missions, it could possibly increase risk of infection, hypersensitivity, or autoimmune issues for exploration astronauts."
Despite these immune system changes, it has yet to be determined whether these alterations increase crew risk for medical issues during spaceflight. According to Crucian, further investigations are required to precisely assess whether there is increased clinical risk to crew members on longer duration missions.
NASA Human Research Program Chief Scientist Mark Shelhamer says continued study of the immune system is critical. "These studies tell us that this is an important issue and that we are measuring the right things," said Shelhamer. "They also tell us there is no place during spaceflight where we see stabilization of the immune system. This is critical as we pursue longer duration missions and why we are studying this further during the upcoming one-year mission."
Once these investigations are complete, Crucian expects the agency will have a decision point for establishing countermeasures that it must then decide how to implement. If deemed necessary, countermeasures for immunity could include new types of radiation shielding, nutritional supplementation, pharmaceuticals and more.
Studies of how space flight affects the immune system may provide benefits to Earth-based medicine. This includes information on how stress causes immune system changes in healthy adults, changes that may precede disease.
In the end, NASA may just shift the immune system during spaceflight from dazed to unfazed.
Story Source:
Materials provided by NASA/Johnson Space Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
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Try the following:
- Follow the setup guide in the application1.
- Please check that you are close enough to your WLAN adapter (< 2m line of sight). The range of the WLAN adapter can be reduced significantly by interference on the Wi-Fi channel.
- Switch to [RUN] mode and return to [AP] mode by pressing the [MODE] button. That way, the adapter will switch to another Wi-Fi channel (1-11). Repeat if necessary.
1 The setup guide ("Add adapter") can be accessed through the main menu.